Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Anyone committed to career advancement faces the
challenge of interacting well in business and social settings. By using the guiding
principles of kindness, consideration and commonsense, professional etiquette
can help you initiate new relationships and enhance established ones. Etiquette
is about relationships. It can guide you in unfamiliar situations and
help you know what to expect from others.

Let’s
use a sports analogy. Suppose you want to join the volleyball league at your
medical center. If you know the rules and know how to play the game, you could
be an asset to the team. Likewise, in the workplace, etiquette makes you a
welcome addition to a leadership team. It increases your confidence in dealing
with all levels of colleagues by leveling the playing field.Many business programs have recognized the
importance of business etiquette and have included it as part of their educational
requirements.Although nursing education
has focused on leadership and management, etiquette has been the missing link
for success in the workplace.

Over
a long career in nursing, I have often been challenged by business etiquette
concerns in positions, such as patient care manager, military officer, faculty
member, academic dean, and board member at a healthcare system. Professional
etiquette has helped me handle these challenges.Let’s discuss five situations where etiquette
can help you target your leadership potential.

1.Making introductions

You may
wonder if it matters who is introduced to whom in an introduction.Yes, it does.There is a pecking order to introductions.The person of honor is mentioned first, and
the other person is introduced to him or her.The higher-ranking person is the person of honor.For example, suppose a new graduate is being
introduced to the nursing supervisor.The supervisor is mentioned first and the new nurse is introduced or
presented to him or her.

Suppose you need to
introduce Mike Smith (new graduate) to Theresa Deska (supervisor).Here is an example of a proper
introduction:“Theresa, I would like to
present Mike Smith.Mike is a new
graduate from Lycoming College.Theresa
Deska is our surgical supervisor.

2.Shaking Hands

Did you
know you are judged by the quality of your handshake? You want to present a
confident, firm handshake. Those few seconds can weaken or empower a
relationship. Be sure to stand up, make eye contact, and smile.

If someone ignores your
attempt to shake hands, gently drop your hand to your side.There are cultural and religious preferences
that affect a handshake.For example, in
the Hindu culture, contact between men and women is avoided, and men do not
shake hands with women.

3.Remembering names

It means a
lot to people to hear their name. People are impressed when you remember their
name.However, many people have trouble remembering
names.Here are some tips to help:

·Listen
and focus when you hear the name.

·Repeat
the person’s name.For example, “It is a
pleasure to meet you, Margaret.”

·Connect
the name to something or someone.For
example, “I have a daughter named Theresa and she spells her name like you.”

·Ask
the person a question about the name?For example, “Do you spell Kathleen with a C or a K?”

·Look
at the person’s nametag.his will help
you remember the name and know how to spell it.

·Write
down the name or ask for a business card.

·Ask
the person for a helpful way to remember how to pronounce the name. For
example, when people ask me how to pronounce Pagana, I tell them to think of
the word “banana.” Then say,
“Pah-gann-a” like “bah-nann-a.”

4.Presenting business cards

Every
leader needs business cards for networking.You can attach a business card to a report or note.This lets the person know you are the sender
and provides your contact information.

Cards should be
presented with the content face up and readable.The receiver should be able to glance at the
card and make a comment.For example, “I
see you are the nurse manager of surgical services.” Make sure the card you
give is in good condition.Don’t use a
card if it is soiled, bent, or ripped, because it will not portray a positive
impression of you.

5.Mingling at receptions and cocktail parties

Your career
aspirations can be enhanced or limited by your behavior as you navigate these
potentially disastrous social gatherings. Inappropriate behavior can undo years
of good impressions.

Attending
work-related receptions shows you are a team player and gives you a chance to
get to know co-workers in a less formal setting.Here are some guidelines for presenting
yourself in a professional manner:

·Smile
and be friendly to everyone.

·Introduce
yourself to people you don’t know.

·Avoid
clustering in small groups with people in your department.

·Spend
more time listening than talking.

·Minimize
“shop talk” during social gatherings.

·Be
sure to greet senior management.Use
engaging small talk.

·If
you don’t call people by their first names at work, don’t start at the social
event.

·Treat
the serving staff with respect.

·Drink
responsibly.

·Avoid
messy foods. Keep your hands clean for shaking hands.

·Be
aware of your body language.Don’t act
bored.

·Thank
your hosts before leaving.

Everyone
can and should learn some basic business etiquette. The better you become at it, the more you
will be sought after for opportunities and positions.These tips can help you handle awkward and
challenging situations that could diminish your confidence, tarnish your
reputation, and derail your career aspirations.

Author bio:Kathleen
D. Pagana, PhD is the author of “The
Nurse’s Etiquette Advantage:How
Professional Etiquette Can Advance Your Nursing Career.”She is a best-selling author of almost 2
million books with translations in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish,
Chinese, Greek, and Polish.She is also a
dynamic keynote speaker who motivates professionals to reach their goals though
presentations on leadership, business etiquette, and life balance.

Thursday, November 19, 2015

Innovation is foundational to business
leadership. We empower individuals across disciplines to evaluate, orchestrate,
strategize, create and hire, but most importantly, we empower others to innovate.
Many leaders may consider empowerment a handoff – a simple process of
delegating work. For the most process-oriented tasks, that assumption may be
true. But for innovation, responsibility begins and remains at the highest
levels of leadership.

Empowering innovation begins with our
everyday behavior, outlook, commitment and openness to new thinking. Just as
leaders deliver big picture messages and strategy, we also set the tone for how
organizations innovate. However, we forget about everyday behavior, because it
is so basic that even the big thinkers—the super smart innovation architects—often
assume that everyday behavior will automatically change once a great system is
in place.

The maxim “everything looks like a nail
to a hammer” is an excellent reminder that every successful innovation effort
relies on the people—and all their fears, emotions, and humanness—who must fuel
it.

Innovation is fundamentally about people;
their assumptions, subconscious thought patterns, daily actions and habits. Taken
together with all the other trappings of business management — procedures,
rewards and penalties, social dynamics, unspoken rules and, of course, stress—it’s
easy to see how innovation yields a wonderfully messy, organic and complex
environment. Above all, behavior drives results, and if leaders fail to address
daily behavior, even the greatest strategies and plans to drive innovation are
doomed to fail.

A managerial culture that strives for efficiency, leanness,
speed and quality above all else is often in conflict with a culture of innovation,
which must make room for experimentation, learning from mistakes and unexpected
connections through exploration.

Here
are six tips that leaders can implement to help create and foster a business
environment that not only welcomes, but also thrives on innovation:

1. Your behavior
matters.

As
the leader of a company your behavior is amplified and seen as the true north
to how things are done in the company. Your words do not matter, if you behave
contrary to them!

2. Your words do matter
when they are aligned with your actions.

Language
is a powerful tool to rally and unify people – especially around innovation.
Choose sticky language, use it, help people make it their own to align and
inspire people to embrace an innovative mindset and innovation behaviors.

3. Strive to decrease
status.

Be
human, real and authentic to encourage participation in innovation activities
and initiatives.

4. Show up!

Be
present and supportive for all innovation related events and initiatives. Being
engaged sends the message that innovation is important and worthwhile of your time, which means it is important
and worthwhile for the people who you lead.

5. Be bold in your
behavioral declaration.

Create
a behavioral manifesto or credo. Publicly state that you will personally strive
to uphold the behaviors you have stated in the credo.

Invite
constructive criticism to demonstrate your desire for continuous improvement and
a willingness to change – two key elements of innovation.

We
all know that how we function in a team, communicate and collaborate with
others is the key to successful innovation, and there’s no better place to
start than at the top. An innovative mindset reevaluates the nature of
innovation and shows how a change in perspective can lead to more dynamic,
successful endeavors.

John Sweeneyis the co-owner and executive producer of the
Brave New Workshop, America’s oldest satirical comedy theatre. He uses his 20+
years of improvisational performance, speaking and training to influence human
behavior and to create simple but groundbreaking tools that have ignited
cultures of innovative behavior within such companies as Microsoft, PWC,
General Mills and UnitedHealthGroup. His new book (with Elena Imaretska) – The
Innovative Mindset: 5 Behaviors for Accelerating Breakthroughs – is available now from Wiley. Visit www.wiley.com to find a bookseller near you.

Thursday, November 12, 2015

If you’ve gotten past the title without choking on your warm office
beverage of choice, you’re probably thinking something like:

1. Are you kidding? You’ve clearly never met
[colleague/boss/archenemy]!

2. Don’t think so. People either have natural leadership ability or
they don’t. If you don’t have the right wiring, it doesn’t matter.

3. Look, I’ve tried hard and made progress, but I can point to any
number of areas where I wouldn’t consider myself “highly effective.”

4. Hmmm…really?

I’ve worked with thousands of leaders over the past twenty-five years.
Based on that experience, I firmly believe almost anyone* can become a highly
effective leader. Regardless of default leadership abilities – the combination
of natural wiring and how someone was parented/taught/led up to now – everyone
can get better as a leader. It just takes the right mindset and tools. (* rare
exceptions for people with serious mental wellness problems. And no, I’m not
talking about your last boss.)

To be a highly effective leader, you’ll need both an internal drive
- the mindset - and an external framework – the tools - for results.

The internal drive is made up of three action-oriented conditions:

·A
deep desire for better results. If you cannot picture any difference between
where you are and where you want to be, nothing will
change. (Hint: this difference is usually easier to see a few years
out rather than today. By picturing how a change will affect what you care
about most in, say, five years, you can usually find the energy to start
changing now.)

·A
willingness to learn and change your own behavior. If you
can experiment with doing things differently and then be open to feedback, you
can get better. Perhaps it’s human nature to try to avoid making mistakes, yet
I’ve always found the lessons I learn from making mistakes define me more than
when I “get lucky” and succeed the first time.

·A
bias for action. Despite millions of health books and videos
sold each year in the United States, public health data show obesity steadily
increasing. It’s clearly not enough just to know how to do things – you must
get into action and apply your thinking to get results.

Without these, there’s no point in embarking on leadership improvement. I
used to think that these three conditions were all leaders needed. However,
over the past decade I‘ve discovered to become truly effective leaders, people
also need:

A comprehensive and practical framework for leadership that works
in the real world.

Without an overarching framework, many leaders end up trying
different techniques. These techniques can often conflict with each
other. And without a clear and consistent set of coordinated actions,
leaders find themselves treating symptoms, not finding and solving the root
causes.

I wrote Ripple: A Field Guide for Leadership That Works
to provide my clients – and you – that comprehensive framework. It starts with
self-leadership (knowing yourself deeply and getting into action as a leader),
moves through interpersonal leadership (how you respect and enable others to
succeed), and finishes at organizational leadership (how you design and tweak
the system to enable effective results efficiently).

Most people in leadership positions start working on efficiency
(results!) in the organization first. When that doesn’t work, they backtrack to
effectiveness (let’s reorg), then to positively enabling others (ah, you need
the right resources to do the work), and then to respecting others (silly me, I
didn’t realize you have different talents than mine).

If these efforts still aren’t working, things get uncomfortable. If
we’re honest with ourselves, we start asking: “As a leader, am I in action
about what matters? And if not, could it be that I don’t understand myself
enough to get out of my own way?”

It begins with you

From my experience, you will get the best results by starting with
yourself, then learn to work well with others, and together you can optimize
your organization. All we need to do to kick off this positive chain reaction
is to change ourselves.

Relatively simple, yet as Marshall Goldsmith says, changing
behavior is one of the most difficult things for adults to do. Why? As adult
humans, we believe we are highly competent and effective. We often wrap our
self-esteem around this perception of competence. To get better, we have to
admit that, in some way, we’re not as competent as we thought. Yet, we
can only admit that if we make it through denial and confusion – our internal
barriers that keep us in our place of comfort and known competence – first.

The good news is that with the right mindset and level of
willingness, along with some hard work and an overarching structure that works,
you too can hurdle your own barriers and train yourself to be a highly
effective leader.

So – what are you waiting for?

About Chris Hutchinson:
Chris Hutchinson has invested the last 25 years working with organizations and
leaders to help them reach their full potential. He founded his company –
Trebuchet Group – in 2002 to help business leaders tap the abilities of their
whole organization to get where they want to go quicker and less painfully.

Thursday, November 5, 2015

Most people would agree that good
leaders are brave leaders. But our definition of brave may vary widely. For
some bravery could mean facing a tough personnel decision or making investment
decisions to enter a new market.

And while those decisions can often
be brave, I contend that the highest form of bravery in an organizational
context is keeping at bay the opposite of bravery; fear.

In our business organizations fear
has a growing influence. This can be seen in our capital allocation decisions,
how we react to competitors and how engaged our employees are in the mission of
the organization that you are leading.

To be a truly great leader you must
tackle the three primary areas that fear can influence your organization and
prevent your business from realizing increased returns and long-term value
creation.

1. The
Cultural Core. I represent this strong cultural core through several key
elements including the development of trust, breaking through organizational
hierarchies, being willing to take risks or even fail, finding employees that
are the right cultural fit and supporting their individuality, and finally, by
developing great communication. Building a strong core lays the foundation for
the next two areas.

2. External
Factors. It is important to avoid the pull to react to the competition,
regulation and risk & control functions, but rather, focus on getting out
in front of these three areas. This requires staying close to the customer and
anticipating where the market is going. You can limit the influence these
factors have by leaning into the cultural core.

3. Improve
Decision Making. Good decision making from a place of strength in your
organizational identity keeps you from getting distracted by concerns around
possible legal land mines or the possibility of negative media exposure. Good
decision making allows the brave leader to go from good to great.

I would love to go into each of
these areas in more detail, but this is a blog post and I spent eleven chapters
on these in my book, Corporate Bravery.

But the reason why these factors
matter is because fear has a way of creeping into your culture little by little
through small decisions that are made every day by managers with influence
within your organization.

That may seem overwhelming since
leaders often struggle with the balance between micromanaging the details and
supporting and empowering their managers towards improved performance. But it
is achievable, and it starts with great leadership.

For that reason, the selection
process for managers must be rigorous and ensure the full alignment of
organizational values, management competencies and performance management to
protect the cultural core from trending negatively over time.

Too often leaders are derailed by
fears that influence their decisions and create cracks for fear to root itself
in the cultural fabric of their organization. It can start out small but will
eventually have an outsized influence on every area of business performance.
Great leadership values bravery over fear and fights to protect culture from
fear’s polluting influence.